


Fugue

by onstraysod



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: The days at Allerdale Hall go on as they always have...
Relationships: Lucille Sharpe/Thomas Sharpe
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Fugue

Once she had thought herself a black moth and she had been content. Emerging with violence from the cocoon, she had thrived in dusty shadows, surviving by tearing butterflies apart. Monstrous, but beautiful in her monstrosity.

Now she realizes that she is not so much a moth as an ancient tree, growing in the deepest part of the forest where the sun never warms, stunted by confinement and twisted by disease. She is unchanging despite wind and weather, stubborn in misery, triumphant in decay, her roots burrowed deep and holding her immobile, the monument into which all the dark, furtive things of the forest crawl and, eventually, die.

The days at Allerdale Hall go on as they always have, conforming themselves to her sameness, her cold inertia. In summer, migrating birds nest in the rafters; in winter, snowflakes float down to form a carpet on the floor. Thomas wanders amidst the rusting labyrinth of his machinery, realigning a gear here, shifting a pulley there, pouring more and more of himself into the inner workings of his inventions, becoming the spark of combustion in their iron hearts. She sits at her piano, slender fingers dancing over keys grown stiff with use and time, and the notes that rise in the cavernous hall are also as they have always been: another kind of language, all the rage and longing and despair she has never been able to express with her mouth. Spine fixed rigid by years of whalebone corsetry, Lucille plays for countless hours, spilling her secrets to the spiders weaving webs in the corners of the room, and if they understand these melodic confessions, they don’t judge.

At night they seek each other, as they always have: the comfort of a heart that began beating in the same womb, the familiarity of a soul deformed by the same neglect. But in this, something is different: there is always around Thomas now a brightness that clings to him as tenaciously as the red clay to the soles of one’s shoes. It burns in his eyes and glows like fire on his palms, and the white heat of him, the blazing light, pains her. She cannot look long upon his brilliance. In the same way, a darkness has wrapped itself around her, growing deeper by the day; clinging like soot, it stains everything she passes or touches. The opposing atmospheres in which they move seem to repel each other, so that even in the same room they brush against each other but do not touch. His light deflects her darkness, his heat her cold, and between them storms brew, the air laced with lightning.

Sometimes when Thomas takes refuge in his workshop, Lucille seeks him out. Her darkness trails up the stairs behind her, the massive train of a gown she can never cast off: heavy as a queen’s regalia, suffocating as a tomb. She finds him at his work table, playing with one of his toy figurines, the little wooden ball tumbling through its delicate mechanism with a faint musical sound. Thomas’s eyes are always fixed upon the figure but his gaze is distant, reviewing some scene he cannot reach.

_Come downstairs_ she says, each time, to pull his attention towards her. She would do anything to attract and hold his notice. She always had. _Let me play to you. A sonata. Your favorite lullaby._

But most of the time now, it is as if he cannot hear her. As if the curtain of light that surrounds him repels all sound, or just the sound of her voice, filtering through all but its long-familiar tone. Or maybe Thomas has learned now to ignore her as if she truly is nothing but one of the black moths clinging to the damp attic walls, feeding on their rot: something to be swept aside or crushed, unheeded, underfoot.

_Look at me!_ she screams, and the rage that fills her makes the darkness swirl about her like a cyclone. She picks up his figurines and throws them at him, time and time again smashing automatons and music boxes, their gears and springs and woodwork shattering against the far wall. And still Thomas turns away from her, passes through her shadow and retreats downstairs, back outside to the machinery too big for her to destroy.

At least the piano still yields to her touch, its strings still vibrating to her will as Thomas once had.

_My beloved_ she whispers as she lies down beside him in the deep silence of the night, his light and her darkness merging into a gulf of dusk between their bodies _we are still one, you and I. I will always be yours and you will always be mine. Is it not so, darling? Why won’t you speak to me, then? Why won’t you touch me? I did everything for you, Thomas, everything to keep us together, and we still are!_ ”

Without turning to face her, his gaze on the ceiling lost in shadow above them, Thomas finally answers. _And yet, Lucille, we have never been farther apart_. He catches her hand as she reaches to stroke his hair, and she feels the electric sting of that light run through her being, scorching and searing, as he brings her fingers to his cheek, to the wound high up beneath his eye she had placed there, the wound through which the ebb of his life had run out. As Thomas rises from the bed, the tips of her fingers pass through the white of his seeming flesh, through his insubstantial skull, until they float against the empty pillow, darkness leeching out in wisps from the form of a human hand made of nothing more than memory.

Once she had rejoiced in being a monster: having claws to scratch and rend, and teeth to tear. Now, as a ghost, she learns at last why monsters weep.


End file.
